What is 37signals up to?
I love 37signals. I think they set a great example of what a company should be and how a company should treat their employees. Getting Real was a fantastic read and I wish more organizations would adopt it. That said, what the hell are they doing in Chicago? I mean besides ample amounts of blogging. Their last product release was Highrise in March 2007. Well over a year ago. I realize that maintaing existing products takes a lot of time and effort but over a year since their last release? Part of the Getting Real philosophy is to stay lean and cut down on the number of features. Thus leading to a quicker release because you don’t get bogged down with the things that are not necessary. So how is it that 37signals has gone 16 months since releasing Highrise? Here is a timeline of 37signals’ releases.
- Basecamp - 2004
- Ta-Da Lists - 2005
- Backpack - 2005
- Whiteboard - 2005
- Getting Real book - 2006
- Campfire - 2006
- Highrise - 2007
For any other small company I would not even care if it had been a year since their last product release. So what? The difference is 37signals has a seriously kick ass dev team. To give a quick overview:
- David Heinemeier Hansson - created Ruby on Rails
- Jamis Buck - Capistrano, Net::SSH, sqlite3-ruby, Rails contributor
- Jeremy Kemper - Rails core member
- Sam Stephenson - wrote Prototype, Rails contributor
- Mark Imbriaco - Rails contributor
That is a bona fide team of hackers. So much so that the significance of each individual’s open source contributions far outweigh their work at 37signals.
It’s likely that 37signals is pushing to mature their current offerings. This is supported by their release of Open Bar and an affiliate program as but both are building on their existing product line, not growing it.
That said, I still expect that we will be seeing something from 37signals before the end of the year. And if they follow their advice in Getting Real there will be a teaser with a lot of early buzz so we’ll know about it well before it actually hits.
Rails-doc.org is my new Rails Reference
When working with a framework as large as Ruby on Rails its necessary to have a reference close by for… well just about everything. Until recently I was a big fan of gotAPI.com because I really appreciated the Ruby and Rails reference tied together. However, the Javascript autocomplete on their search box is broken in Firefox 3 so I decided to try the new Rails reference site, Rails-doc.org.
Rails-doc.org is an fairly ambitious project to create a community driven Rails documentation site. Basically they let users sign up and contribute notes to the existing Rails documentation. This certainly has the potential to be very useful, especially for new Rails hackers because sometimes the people who have been around the framework for a while just take things for granted.
Take the documentation for strftime in the Date class for example. There is no documentation listed for that method. Despite the fact that you clearly need documentation of the strftime options in order to use that method. Instead you have to know to look under strftime in the Time class for the documentation. While this is an example specific to Ruby documentation, these are the kinds of obvious problems that a community documentation website can help solve.
Right now Rails-doc.org has only been live for a month the so amount of community documentation feels very low. In the mean time I’ll be using the site for the official documentation that is already in place. Plus its the best looking rendering of the Rails documentation site out there. The Nodeta guys did a good job with the design. They also have a nice looking blog.
It will be interested to see how many of the notes contributed to Rails-doc get ported to the official Rails documentation. This certainly feels like the easiest and most straightforward way to contribute to Rails documentation and I can see it becoming a testing ground for future contributions to the official docs.
“Wanted” a Movie Review
Yes, you read the title correctly, I’m doing a movie review. Quite unexpected since I know absolutely nothing about reviewing movies. However, I’m making an exception in this case because I got the opportunity to see the movie Monday and it does not come out in theaters until Friday. What was the occasion? TechCrunch, where I just started my internship, teamed up with MySpace to do a screening of Wanted in San Francisco for 200 lucky TechCrunch readers. Actually let me revise that. 200 TechCrunch readers and get this, the first 50 MySpace users in line who added Wanted to their top 8 friends and printed their profile. Needless to say, the theater was a rare blending of the two completely opposite crowds of people.
So what about the actual movie? Wanted pulls its style from a variety of different action movies. First it borrows a little bit of The Matrix’s disregard for Physics. Mix in Shoot ‘Em Up’s abundance of manslaughter. Finally throw in a high speed car chase plus gunfight that is standard for any action movie and you’ve got Wanted.
Luckily the “curving bullets” thing doesn’t end up being as lame as it looks in the preview. Instead it serves as a nice touch that differentiates the movie from every other action movie. Although it’s really entertaining to watch the actors shoot a “curving bullet” because it looks more like they are throwing a baseball sidearmed than shooting a gun.
The movie is such that when it finishes and your sitting in your seat as the credits play your thinking to yourself “either that was really dumb or it was freaking awesome”. Ultimately you cannot decide which it is so you compromise and declare that it was both.
Unfortunately the movie has a piss poor name. After seeing the movie I still cannot determine why they called it Wanted. I am sure that people will remember the movie 5 years from now but absolutely no one will remember its generic title. They’ll say, “Oh yeah! the curving bullets movie with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman! What was the name of that?”. Ultimately no one will be able to remember and they’ll have to look it up on IMDB.
Despite my criticisms, the occasional cheesy dialog, and not-so-stellar performance by James McAvory, Wanted is a good movie and I recommend seeing it. If nothing else it is very entertaining. But honestly don’t take my word for it because like I said, I know absolutely nothing about reviewing movies. Nor do I have any authority on the matter. Instead I referrer you to Rotten Tomatoes where Wanted is currently at a very respectable 93%.
People I’d like to see on Twitter
Randall Munroe - I’d wager that Mr. XKCD has dozens of ideas every day that he probably does not develop enough to turn into a full on comic. These dozens of little thoughts and ideas Randall has would make for excellent Twitter fodder.
Stephen Colbert - Comedic geniuses create the best Twitter streams. Who better than Colbert? There was a fake Stephen T Colbert who was doing a pretty good job of imitating Colbert until he was ousted.
John Hodgman - “Resident Expert” on The Daily Show and author of the book The Areas of My Expertise, John Hodgman would no doubt make a kick ass Twitter. Plus, I’m pretty sure he would beat Justin Long in a hypothetical fight.
Fake Steve Jobs - Yes, I want the fake Steve Jobs to be on Twitter more than the real one. I have nothing against the real Steve Jobs and I confess I would still follow him on Twitter but I can imagine that the majority of his status updates would be along the lines of “in a meeting”. Judging by his blog, and the fact that he is a professional journalist, Fake Steve Jobs would undoubtably write more entertaining updates.
Mark Cuban - Aside from the small fact that Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks, he writes one of the best weblogs on the Internet. He seems to thrive when it comes to writing long, well thought out entries, but I bet he has a decent short game too.
That is all I can think of for now. And, unlike the aforementioned 5 people, you can follow me on Twitter to see what I’m thinking about.
Ruby-Poker 0.3.0
Ruby Poker has been updated! This release is largely a result of bug reports filed by Jim W. He took ruby poker to areas I had not previously thought to explore and he ran into a couple nasty bugs. They have all been fixed in Ruby-Poker 0.3.0. In addition the following changes were made that users should be aware of.
